Newsmaker of the week, East Side Access

The timeline for the long-awaited and long-delayed project to connect the Long Island Rail Road with the east side of Manhattan has been pushed back again – and its pricetag continues to rise.

According to The Wall Street Journal, MTA officials next week will present a new timeline for the East Side Access project, pushing its completion date 2021, with its cost estimated at $10 billion or higher.

This is just the latest of a myriad delays for the project, which was launched in 2001 and initially expected to be finished by December 2013.

That date hasn’t been accurate since at least 2010, when federal officials pegged it at 2016.

In 2012, then-MTA chief Joe Lhota told LIBN that East Side Access would be delayed until 2019. At the time, Lhota said the issue was with tunneling underneath the Queens rail yard near Jamaica, where trains from Amtrak and Acela are stored in addition to MTA’s own vehicles.

It has been estimated that East Side Access would shave 40 minutes off of Long Island commuters’ travel times and boost the capacity of LIRR by 40 percent.

“There are 800,000 people per day that go through Penn Station,” Lhota said. “And 60 percent of those are Long Island Rail Road riders. East Side Access should relieve a lot of that burden.”